From City City Pres Church Denver:
The Celebration of the Church Year. For centuries Christians have followed what is known as the Liturgical or Church Year. The year is based upon the major events in the life of Christ and the early Church. It is comprised of the following major seasons: Advent, celebrating the coming of Christ to us in his birth and culminating on Christmas Day; Epiphany, celebrating the visit of the Magi to the Christ child and his manifestation to the Gentiles (non-Jews); Lent, a season of reflection and repentance which begins 40 days prior to Easter (coinciding with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the desert); Holy Week, which commemorates the last week of Christ’s life, and culminates on Easter Sunday when we celebrate the resurrection; and finally Pentecost, which marks the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the first Christians and the birthday of the Church. All Sundays after Pentecost are marked as Ordinary Time.
As Thomas Howard writes in Evangelical Is Not Enough: “The liturgical year is nothing more (and nothing less) than the Church’s ‘walking through’ the gospel with the Lord. Since it is a plain fact of our humanness that we are rhythmic creatures who must keep coming back to things that are always true, it is especially good for us to do this in the Church. We do it in our natural lives: someone is born and is with us day after day, year after year...we marry and take up daily life with spouses year after year, but once a year we find that it is a good thing to mark this ever- present fact, not because it is less true on other days but because we are the sort of creature that is helped and filled with joy when the routines and ever-present fact are set apart, gilded, and held up for our contemplation and celebration...
"It enriches our apprehension of the thing; whereas, left to our own capacity to keep things alive in our minds, we might find that they have sunk into a kind of autumnal dimness. They need to be revivified, not because they dwindle in significance between times, but because we dwindle in our capacity to stay alive to them.”
